Topic: Xenoblade Chronicles 3

It's been awhile since I made the comment you're replying to, but I don't think I said it should be remastered soon. Maybe something that could happen by the end of the Switch successor's life at the earliest.

There's a lot mechanically in that game that could be reworked (or entirely re-envisioned) to make it a much better game to actually play (not even taking a graphical enhancement into account). It could much better tutorialize the battle system so people know what they're doing, they should rework (or completely excize) the Field Skill system, & no longer tie Rare Blades to the Gacha system (maybe remove the Gacha system entirely). They should add an entire suite of new sidequests to unlock Rare Blades instead.

Even graphically there could be a few areas of improvement though. If Switch's successor is still portable, a hypothetical remaster wouldn't have to dip it's resolution so low in portable mode, for example. This would be a bit of a "plus" & not the main reason for a remaster though.

I am inclined to agree! I did all the side quests in the game and I found myself recognizing npcs in the colonies and remembering their individual quests! I will never forget the ultimate duo of bambam and dorin 😂

@Takoda
If you go for new playthrough don't choose new game + because it waters down the entire experience. Just a normal playthrough except sidequests too this time! It changed my opinion at least.

@Ralizah Gameplay-wise, it was kind of a slog to play because they made the maps bigger but it feels like the walking speed we have is still accustomed to the smaller maps of the previous games. I did some exploring hoping to find some kind of spark there but with the ‘secret spots’ I found and just seeing more of the map in general it felt like there weren’t really many spots that made me go ‘wow, this was worth the trek’ with how slow it all moves.

The combat, then, was also kind of a downgrade for me. With 2, it took some time to click but then I got it. With 3, I played on hard mode, and I never once felt like a party wipe had a clear reason as to why I’d lose one time, and win the next. With 7 characters on screen it just isn’t feasible to find what works and doesn’t work in the heat of battle, so it felt like I had to do a lot of menuing and min-maxing but then when it came to battle it was hard to tell if it was working or not. (The menu music slowly driving me insane didn’t help) Half the time I’d unlock new classes I’d not even know what makes them stand out from the other ones, so I’d try to experiment and get a better grasp on them but then there was very little telling me if my party synergy was good or bad.

So my biggest gripe is how slow you move around the world and that kind of impacts the entire game sadly, and how very often because of the chaos of 7 characters going at it at once I could barely tell what part of my kit was working and which wasn’t, so party wipes would often feel kind of random. On normal difficulty the battles would often be a cakewalk though so I never really found that balance. I played through the entire game and ouroboros also never really felt as cool as they wanted it to be, feels like a mechanic that just never really meshed well with me, not in gameplay nor in story, but that’s definitely just a ‘feel’ thing, not a fact.

Chain attacks are kinda cool when you get the hang of them but the music starts to grate on me and god, they last so long and (on hard mode at least) don’t really do as much damage as you’d like them to for that much set-up. Party-wiping at the last second on a hard boss would just make me sigh because of all the chain attacks I have to get through again. Then on normal, one would usually be enough and tear through the boss but like I said before, I’d like a bit more balance, not either tearing through it or HP sponge the game.

In 2’s combat it felt engineered for HP Sponges because you’d need them to survive long to set up the elemental combos and such, and though it was messy, that game’s combat did feel better to me after playing this. Seems a lot in 3’s complaints comes down to things taking long but not really feeling like there’s a reason for them to. Like they could’ve sped up the walking speed, given a ‘run’ option or something but nah, we’re stuck with what we got and though the world does feel bigger that way, doesn’t feel more fun or stunning to traverse, just takes longer.

I feel like I owe it to this game to play the sidequests because I keep tearing into it so harshly in every aspect, like it feels like I missed something that other people must’ve seen when they call this a masterpiece or just an amazing game. Like the entire time I had these complaints while playing I thought ‘maybe I just don’t ‘get’ it yet, maybe very soon, it will click for me.’ But sadly it never clicked and right up until the final boss I didn’t really know why I’d party wipe one attempt and how I won the next one except for sheer luck and random factor. I mean, the battle system is constantly praised so I must’ve missed something, but it doesn’t feel like I have. Anyway, would love to hear your opinion on it, to maybe see the gameplay in a different light.

@Cia Thanks for the tip! I noticed this too when I attempted to do new game +, and I’ll definitely just start up a completely new game when I get to it, just feels better.

@Takoda
Another thing to reconsider if you try Xenoblade 3 again: do not rely on chain attacks too much. I barely ever use them because it's the one boring aspect in the game and I can easily do more damage with Ouroboros. You just need to remember to lvl the Ouroboros up to lv2 or 3 in each fight and later in the game unlock arts canceling for MASSIVE DMG!

My Future Redeemed review

And so I finished Future Redeemed in two days. Shortly, it is nowhere near as good as the main game, but then again it's a DLC.

It feels a lot like Xenoblade 3 Light. All the gameplay aspects are less complex and more streamlined. The best thing is weapon upgrading which actually works better than the one in the main game.

Yeah, I didn't really feel it because I wanted something a bit meatier. The whole game felt like an excuse to run to the final boss, probably because it was too short to tell its ambitious story. There was simply not enough space to build meaningful character arcs for the party. I felt like Nikol and Glimmer didn't get enough backstory and Shulk and Rex just kind of were there because fanservice, so the only character I rooted for was Matthew. (Oh yeah, A was also a character. Kind of.)

The villain, Alvis, is reduced to your basic "I destroy world" bad guy. Z with the Mobius and especially N from the main game were a much more interesting menace. Future Redeemed does them disservice, though, in its devaluing attempts.

Future Redeemed doesn't really improve the story of the main game in any meaningful way. Quite the contrary, I felt like it watered down some aspects of it. I suppose it's decent enough to end the Xenoblade series in whole, but it's too bad it has to achieve this by the expense of Xenoblade 3 itself.

If I gave the main game easy 10/10, this DLC would be 7,5/10. Still, you can't expect the impossible from a short (by rpg standards) expansion that's supposed to conclude the entire series, so I can understand if someone would rate it higher. To say it's better than the main game is just blatantly false, though. It's too short and meaningless to even compete.

Future Redeemed may be a watered down, fan-servicey version of 3 but it has in my opinion the most charming protagonist of the series. The nerve of Monolith to create Matthew, who has the naiveté of Shulk, the optimism of Rex and the sanguine of Noah, and make him a DLC character. Same with Addam for that matter.

They gave him a top name too. 😉

I'd just see the entirety of Future Redeemed as a love letter to the fans with all the recurring characters, locations and references. It really brings the entire series together in a way that the base game couldn't quite do, because they had to make things intelligible enough for people who were playing it as their first.

To that end I feel like some kind of all-stars Warriors game is inevitable now that Xenoblade's getting the same good word of mouth as the likes of Fire Emblem and Persona... that's his time to shine!

I enjoyed Future redeemed much more than the main game on first playthrough honestly, since it felt like all the references to the past games actually mattered here instead of in the main game where I’d have preferred they keep them out of the game if they weren’t going to be used in any meaningful way. The streamlining of the gameplay did it a lot of good too and the flow of exploration was a lot better. The story does its job to conclude the series in a more satisfying way than the base game did so feels like as someone who played 1 and 2 this is what I expected them to do all along. I didn’t enjoy the main story for all its lack of impact and tropes in the wrong places at the very end with all the build-up, and this felt like it got the ending really right, the characters were decent and Matthew beats Noah and Mio easily as a protagonist and made the story more fun to follow by default almost at points.
Alpha was… definitely something odd, like them bending over backwards to shove Alvis in as a villain, but at least without all the build-up that Z got and utterly failed to deliver on, I could just beat him down without too many expectations and the ending was quite satisfying. Without all the classes to worry about I could actually enjoy the combat more instead of min-maxing customisation without much idea what does what. The gameplay systems aren’t as complex but hence they work better to actually deliver for me instead of how it felt rather cluttered and almost overblown with fluff mechanics in the base game. Kind of hoping that with the DLC story actually giving me a better conclusion, I might see more in the base game upon revisiting it, even if the main story can’t be salvaged much at points imo.

I’m bound to fire this game up again soon with all this activity here haha-

@Aioniomios So now that you're back I've gotta ask. Did you play Future Redeemed? What did you think?

@Vortexeo
I did, yes. But to be honest, I'm a bit mixed on it, like I am with all the side campaigns we've gotten so far.
It's always nice to experience more Xenoblade of course, but these extras are too short to make much of an impact with me. I look at them as nice bonus content, but little more. It's the main games that count.

@Aioniomios Ahhh that's fair enough 😅. I did enjoy it myself (I actually did complete it to 100% completion) but I do remember "accidentally" finishing it because I wasn't expecting it to end when it did lol.

@EaglyPurahfan
Lol, that's quite funny actually.

First post on NL’s forums! I’m just wondering but what do people here think of the theory with D potentially being the Mythrakid?

@EaglyBird True, I like the theory but I still think it’s unlikely. There’s people who are like “oh they’ll appear in Xenoblade 4!” but Takahashi said the next game will be very different so I doubt we’ll see any more characters/elements relating to the Klaus Saga

@luckyseven Welcome to the forum part of the site! Glad to see another diehard Xenoblade fan around here! 😂

@EaglyBird This image has reminded me of why I stopped opening random threads

@Vortexeo Thanks! Always happy to meet more Xenoblade fans so we can appreciate this wonderful series. I don’t typically use forums but since I’m here I figured it wouldn’t hurt to branch out a little asides from commenting on articles. And yeah that’s true about Dirk, it makes for great story potential especially when you take the themes of Aionios into consideration.